


Light into Darkness

by demiurgent_g



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-20 03:48:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14887052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demiurgent_g/pseuds/demiurgent_g
Summary: The Doctor is reunited with Donna





	1. Chapter 1

“No, she didn’t! She always was bad! So is she keeping it? I totally told Cece that Maisy knew Callie was into him, and I was right! Oh my god, how bad is she!? Did you hear about Becks though?” No answer. “Hey, though, did you hear about Becks?” Still no answer? “Are you even listening? You are so rude!” I look at my phone screen. The call was cut off. She better not have hung up on me though.

“No!” A man shouts loudly, right close to my ear.

“Keep it down, mate. Did your call get dropped too?”

“No! Send her back! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

His eyebrows need some serious tweezing and I’ve had enough of his attitude.

“How dare you! I can go wherever I want and as for knowing what I’m doing… Well I’m better off than you mate. Rude. That’s what you are, rude!”

“Donna, shut up. This is not the time.”

“Don’t you tell me what to do! And how do you know my name? Who the hell are you?” I step towards him as I talk and my footsteps echo weirdly. No wonder - what used to be a shop floor is now metallic, black and lit so badly it might be massive or tiny. “And where the hell are we? What did you do to me? Is this some kind of weird sex dungeon?” I recoil backwards in horror. “If you think you’re going to get your old-man hands on me you could not be more wrong mate.”

“I didn’t bring you here, Donna.”

“Then why am I here? And who are you - wait. I know you!”

He freezes. “You do?”

“Yeah, you’re the weird guy from Grandad’s funeral. You’re the one who threw litter into the grave!”

He looks relieved which drives me to new heights of fury. “How dare you? Don’t you have any respect? No-one there even knew you! And where did you go to after that? I followed you and you completely disappeared. Just threw your trash on grandad and left! And Mum was no help - she just said to leave it, but I’m not letting you get away with it! Someone should teach you a lesson.”

“Donna, please, you have to go home. You have to go back, right now.”

“Ohhhh no. I’m not going anywhere mate. Not until I’ve got a proper apology out of you.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I’m sorry Wilf died. I’m sorry I couldn’t speak to you on the day. I’m sorry you were brought here. But you have to go. Now.”

“Well. Alright then.” I wasn’t expecting him to cave so quickly. A draft kicks up around my ankles. “I don’t fancy staying here anyway. How do I get back?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I don’t know how to get you back.”

“So, you kidnap me, bring me to a black place, tell me to leave and won’t tell me how? Ohhhh, very helpful. Very nice of you. Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ve travelled mate. I won the lottery. I’ve been everywhere and there’s nowhere I can’t get home from. Where’s the door?”

“Ah.” His hands have been held in front of him throughout - alternatively waving and clung together, but at this they drop to his sides and he looks almost forlorn. 

“Why is the Doctor never around when you need him?” I ask with a sigh and pain slashes across his face as confusion fills my mind.

The black shadows swell and engulf me.

 

THREE DAYS EARLIER

Music swirls round the TARDIS controls, chords caressing her as she pulsates to the beat. The Doctor sits alone on the stairs leading to the library, huddled around his guitar with a small smile on his face. The moment of harmony is disrupted by a sudden jolt. The alarms blare after the collision, testament to how wrapped in their own little world the Doctor and TARDIS had been.

He leaps to his feet and dives for the controls. She changes colour and rhythm in a way that indicates displeasure. 

“I’m not exactly happy about it either, old girl! I was enjoying our time off.” The wicked grin on his face belies his words and she humms her disbelief. 

“Quite right.” His grin remains in place and his fingers fly, rapidly flicking switches as he seeks the object they hit and locks onto its trail. Satisfied with his work, he looks up to the light above the central console placing his hand on a lever. “Let’s go find something new!” His eyebrows flirt with her, and when she pulsates her thrill, he shouts triumphantly and slams the lever hard. The two plummet together, exhibiting uninhibited pleasure as they do: he with a mad grin and she with her song.

They arrive in the succulent forests of Galaria, where tubescent pink flora towers above the gravelled floor, and the air is filled with the constant trill of the silicon falls. The Doctor is bewildered.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he mutters, reading the screens. “The trail we followed is clear, right up until the inner atmosphere. It’s as though it simply ceased to exist. There’s no sign of damage - no debris, no ionisation. I can’t see any indication of a time shift either.” His eyebrows are fiercely knit as he frowns, frustrated at his inability to make out what happened. 

“I’m going out,” he tells the TARDIS. “Maybe there’s something out there causing interference.”

She pulsates her understanding and he heads for the door. “Won’t be long,” he tells her, glancing over his shoulder as he passes through the portal.

He walks out into the forests, and pauses to enjoy a lungful of the air. The perfume of the Galarian forests is something special and unique, and that first deep breath is glorious. The smile it brings to his face is one of genuine pleasure and it lasts while he wanders round, seeking a clearing or a high point he can look at the sky from.

He comes across an outcrop of rock and makes his way up. Once past the first level of branches the forest plants typically grow straight up and his view now contains multitudes of pink poles, reminiscent of a princess style bouncy castle on acid. The landscape beyond is purple tinted and glittering, but cannot hold his attention as he turns his eyes to the green sky.

All seems normal except… Frowning, he tilts his head. There’s a distortion, almost like a heat patch, but wrong. He slides his sunglasses on and tilts his head back, to see if it polarises. As he leans backwards, he tilts into a new space.

He’s surrounded by inky blackness and when he takes his sunglasses off, it barely lightens.

“Hello?”

His call echoes in the cavernous space. The floor beneath his feet is metallic, but on closer inspection is silicon based, perfectly in keeping with Galarian design. He shakes his screwdriver and sends out a brief pulse to see how big the space is. 

When there is no response, he frowns and shakes the screwdriver again. 

The distance from the earth to the moon would be measured and reported in 4 seconds. Wherever he was, the space was large. Extremely large. 

He makes a note of the time the pulse was sent and then double checks, shaking the screwdriver more vigorously. The device has registered a full day since leaving the TARDIS.

  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Over the hundreds - thousands - of years he'd learned blustering and to always be first to speak, to state his case. He'd learned to talk fast and think faster. He'd learned vengeance, a level of wrath that would melt suns, and a compulsion to interfere wherever he saw injustice. Of all the things he had learned, patience was not among them. So it would surprise many who knew him that his next action was to remove his coat, bundle it as a makeshift pillow, slide his sunglasses on and lie down on the silicon floor.

He lay, twirling his screwdriver between his fingers, staring into the inky blackness of the vast space and musing aloud upon the nature of time. "I would feel time travel, you know." His tone is not aggressive or defensive as it might be if he were addressing a captor, but instead one of mild interest and curiosity, as if teaching an eager child. "I feel the passage of time, each moment falling upon the next, cascading through space like light through a crack in a door, casting shadows to frighten little children." He tosses the screwdriver once, watching it spin in the air and then easily catching it again. 

"There's a story about taking a holiday to a black hole that is told to children. You can teleport instantly, and perch on the edge of the entity for barely a second and yet when you return it is hours, weeks or months later. Why? What could cause that?"

"It's not all about time, you see. Sometimes it's about space. And there's so much space. Time is finite. It begins, it ends. But space? Space goes on indefinitely. Space is the great forever. You cannot take a step without there being more space to take the next step. And space will always be changing as electrons dance to the rhythm of the cosmic heartbeat. The space you step into is not the same as the space you step out of. It reforms constantly around you, disrupted by the ripples you make in time. There might be barriers that make you feel trapped. There might be dangers that make you feel vulnerable. And there will always be more space to run into."

"AND MORE TIME TO RUN INTO IT."

"No! No, no, no, no, no, no!" Despite the vehemence of his words, the doctor remains supine, playing with his screwdriver. "No, everybody runs out of time. But no matter how far or fast you move, you cannot run out of space."

"AND NOW YOU, DOCTOR, ARE OUT OF TIME."

The voice is emotionless. A million and more tiny voices speak in unison creating a chord. It is not unpleasant or loud. It's oddly reminiscent of the flooring and the blackness.

"Many people have told me that." The Doctor's head tilts although his glasses render his expression inscrutable. "They have never yet been right. On occasion that's been purely because of Time Lord biology of course, but even so..."

"DOCTOR. YOU HAVE DESTROYED WORLDS, DESTROYED LIVES, DESTROYED THE PEACE AND TRANQUILITY OF CIVILISATIONS AND YOU ARE TO BE HELD TO ACCOUNT. YOUR TIME OF RAMPAGE IS OVER."

The screwdriver has been stationary as the million voices speak. When they fall silent it somersaults lazily once through the air and lands with a small smack in the palm of the Doctor's hand.

"DO YOU FEAR TO DEFEND YOURSELF, DOCTOR?" The unified voices are still emotionless, not even curiosity marring their question which is delivered with all the humanity of a self assessment for tax form.

"In the time it took you to make that statement, billions of lives were lost. Stars died and were born, predators killed and scavengers ate."

"37,896,002,003 DISTINCT LIVES ENDED. FOUR STARS COLLAPSED INTO BLACK HOLES, TWO WHITE DWARFS WERE BORN AND ONE NEW STAR. WHAT IS YOUR POINT, DOCTOR?"

"Who do you blame for all of that?" The Doctor is glancing at his screwdriver, positing the question with nothing more than mild interest.

"THERE WERE 16,975,201 MURDERS, 4,987,008,241 DEATHS DUE TO AVOIDABLE CIRCUMSTANCES SUCH AS STARVATION OR LACK OF SANITATION. TWO OF THE BLACK HOLES WERE THE RESULT OF OVER MINING A STAR. THE BLAME APPORTIONED IS TO INDIVIDUALS WHO HAVE CAUSED LITTLE HURT IN COMPARISON TO THE DEVASTATION YOU HAVE WROUGHT."

"You are very precise."

"WE ARE."

"Too precise, some might say, to be organic."

"THEY WOULD BE CORRECT."

The screwdriver loops once more, and the Doctor falls into silence. The entity is also silent. Nothing happens for a long time and then the lights flare. Even behind his sunglasses the Doctor flinches, and as the lights fade, resembling glow bugs in a swamp, he rises and glances around curiously.

“What was that?”

"IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY DEFENCE, ALL FORMS OF THE DOCTOR ARE TO BE ASSEMBLED AND DESTROYED."

"Oh, yes? Well, it'll be nice to meet me again. I haven't done that for a while. Will all of my incarnations be here? Even the skinny one?"

"YOU MISUNDERSTAND DOCTOR. WHEN YOU REGENERATE THE PRIOR FORM IS DESTROYED AND REPLACED BY THE NEW FORM. NO PART REMAINS. WE ARE ASSEMBLING THE PARTS OF YOU EMBODIED ELSEWHERE IN THIS UNIVERSE."

"I am the only one of me in this universe! There is no-one else. What are you doing?"

"YOU ARE INCORRECT DOCTOR. THERE IS A PIECE OF YOU EMBODIED IN ANOTHER FORM."

"He's with Rose!"

"WE ARE RESTRICTED TO OPERATE WITHIN THIS UNIVERSE."

"My daughter?"

"THE SINS OF THE FATHER WILL NOT BE PAID FOR BY HIS CHILDREN."

"Then who?"

Behind him, she is pulled into being, like a magic eye image coming into focus. First colour, then shape, then details.

The voice arrives last.

"No."

His whispered word is torn from him.

"No." A statement now, drowned by her rapid fire commentary.

"No!"

That gets her attention.

“Keep it down, mate. Did your call get dropped too?”

“No! Send her back! You don’t know what you’re doing!”


	3. Chapter 3

“Stop this!” The Doctor stands away from the fallen woman, semaphoring a stop signal as he does. “Stop this right now! Do you know what you’re doing to her? Do you know how dangerous it is for her to remember me?”

WE ARE AWARE. THE HUMAN DONNA NOBLE IS PROTECTED.

“Protected? Protected! She’s unconscious after screaming in pain. What is she protected from?”

TIME, DOCTOR.

The Doctor falls silent and moves towards her. He reaches out gently to turn her and hesitantly cups her cheek in his hand. He focusses on her and steps into her mind. As the million voices declared, her mind has been stepped outside of time. Her body is fully functional, but no time passes within the confines of her physical form.

Confused, he takes the opportunity to explore further; the version of himself is also there and he melds with it. The first thing he notices is the cage, pressing down on him from all angles. It hurts and constricts like a corset, forcing the sliver of him into a form that should never have existed. And co-mingled with him are threads of her. All of her memories, all of her knowledge, understanding. All those facets of her that had earned her place in the Ood song were wrapped into the shard of the Doctor and imprisoned alongside him.

And now… The cage is still there, but both the Doctor and Donna have begun to ooze out between the bars. No catastrophic failure has occurred; the process is more reminiscent of cold treacle pouring from a tin. But in this place outside of time, the process happens immediately while being unbearably slow.

Terrified, the Doctor tries to will it not to happen, but can only observe. Miraculously, the brain death he expects doesn’t occur. It’s only when he sets aside his emotions and looks logically at what is happening that he understands.

Whatever they are, the million voices have a fine control of time. They successfully released Donna’s caged mind in a manner that would cause the least trauma, while also freezing time around those parts of her brain that would be harmed by the presence of a Tine Lord.

When his hand drops from her face and the psychic link falls with it he sees the world once more through his own eyes. Her eyes are open and she is angry. The slap comes from nowhere.

Ears ringing, he recoils and the two of them face off.

IT IS TIME FOR THE RECKONING, DOCTOR. The million voices intrude. YOUR WHOLE PERSON IS HERE AND YOU MUST BE DESTROYED.

Donna disregards the voices. Staring furiously at the Doctor she spits out a question: “How dare you? What gave you the right to fiddle around in my head? I told you I didn’t want that!”

“Donna, I saved you. I saved your life!”

“Is that what you think? You really think you saved my life?”

“You would have died!” His accent becomes more pronounced as his own temper is riled. “No human can live with a Time Lord consciousness tearing them apart! You have all of my knowledge rattling around inside your head and you know that I saved you-”

“You saved yourself!”

The words flew like daggers and landed at the heart of that secret shame he’d carried for centuries. Into the cavernous silence her words fell, piling into cairns of pain, memorialising his betrayal on both the greatest and worst day of her life.

“You didn’t save me. You killed me. You ripped my life from me; reverted me to a child and expected me to be happy to play with my toys.” She isn’t still. Her arms gesticulate in barely controlled fury, channelled through time and condensed into an instrument of torture. “And sure the heart kept beating and the arms and legs kept moving but it wasn’t me. I was trapped in a world without miracles, without pleasure or pain. Do you even understand?”

He opens his mouth to speak, but subsides after the merest grunt.

“You don’t, do you? You never stopped to think what it would do to me. You just wanted to feel good about yourself and damn what it meant for anyone else.” A tear escapes her right eye. He is hypnotised by it – it is easier than confronting the reality before him.

“My mother cried. Do you understand? My. Mother. Cried.” She disappears into her memories and he is relieved from the intensity of her gaze, although the words continue to lacerate him.

“I heard her, night after night, never knowing what was wrong or how to help. And they looked at me – so disappointed. Over and over. So disappointed that I wasn’t who they wanted me to be. And I thought it was my fault! I thought if I could get it right then everything would be ok but it never mattered. It was never enough. They couldn’t stop grieving! I was a constant reminder of the daughter – the granddaughter – they’d lost. Constantly rubbing it in.” Her head snaps back to him and all of the strength, fury and power she possesses are drawn in her defiant stance – fists barely curled, but ready to fight him to death to have her own way.

“And now you want me to go back? You want to give me a mental disorder to save my life? You want me to have to cackle instead of laughing, because I don’t know what true joy is? You want me to have hysterics instead of weep, because I don’t know what sorrow is? You want me to spend every second of every day pantomiming emotions louder and longer than anyone else, because I don’t know what they are?”

She shakes her head. “Worse. You also want me to thank you.”

She strides forwards, finger pointing straight at his sternum. “Well let me tell you this. Not. A. Chance.”

He watches the finger stab him and his eyes finally raise to hers with a look of awe and wonder.

“You’re right.”

The words are quiet and almost escape her. She is suspicious of his quiet acquiescence.

AN ACCORD HAS BEEN REACHED. THE TIME FOR DIS-

“Oh shut up!” The two voices break out in unison. He looks to the lights when he speaks, she looks upwards. Neither spends long looking and quickly resume their previous conversation.

“You’re right. Taking your memories of me destroyed you. I thought it was right at the time but it wasn’t. You were unmade and that was my fault. I love you, Donna. You were the best friend I could have had and I’m so sorry I did that to you.”

There’s a moment of silent stillness, broken by the abrupt hug she foists upon him. He recoils slightly under her weight but returns the embrace with a gentle smile.

When they finally break apart she asks: “So now what?”

THE DOCTOR DIES.

“Excuse me, what?”

“This is a computer, of sorts, and it has determined that it should kill me for the crimes I’ve committed. You’re here because there’s a piece of me within you.”

“What, it wants to kill me?”

THE HUMAN DONNA NOBLE HAS DONE NO WRONG

“Well, I wouldn’t say no wrong…” Donna can’t repress the quip.

THE SHARD OF THE DOCTOR CAN BE DESTROYED AND THE HUMAN DONNA NOBLE RETURNED INTACT TO HER LIFE.

“No.”

WE UNDERSTAND YOUR CONCERN. UNLIKE YOUR RECENT EXPERIENCE, THERE WILL BE NO LOSS OF MEMORY OR FUNCTIONALITY.

“You understand my-  What? No! I am not having it! I just got him back and I am not about to lose him again!”

“Donna…” She stares at him as the reality of their situation wells over her.

“Is that what this is? It’s my choice? Me or you?”

He nods, wordlessly.

“But I’m fine! We’ve been here for ages and I’m fine!”

The Doctor nods again and checks his screwdriver. “Yes, you have.”

THERE IS A SUPPRESSION ZONE WITHIN THE FACILITY THAT PREVENTS INTERFERENCE BETWEEN THE ELEMENTS OF THE DOCTOR AND YOUR MIND THAT CO-MINGLED LEAD TO YOUR TERMINATION.

Donna’s jaw drops and she stares upwards as the million voices intonate solemnly. When they subside she turns to the Doctor.

“Is there an English translation of that?”

“Time isn’t passing in your body. You aren’t aging, growing or even really living. You – we – are suspended in time, conscious and independent, but subject to none of the rigours of time.”

“So, when I get home, no-one will notice I’ve gone?”

“You’ve already been here almost a week.”

“Time isn’t passing.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s a week later?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to need a little more of the fine detail.”

The Doctor’s face lights up into a wicked grin. “Wouldn’t you rather get out of here?”

“Alone, or with you?”

“My preference would be to come with you. Are you in?”

She nods firmly. “Abso-blummin-lutely.”

 


End file.
